Precision Medicine's Role in One Health
In many ways, geneticists have always applied One Health principles to their work.
As Leslie Lyons, PhD, Gilbreath-McLorn Endowed Professor of Comparative Medicine at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine, explains, geneticists have always applied One Health principles to their work.
"One Health is a is a new word that everybody's passing around, but again that is nothing new. Since we really started doing anatomy, there was always comparative anatomy. So, comparative genetics, comparative anatomy— it's comparative medicine. It's all the same thing, it's One Health. It's people realizing that mammals have the same genetic plan. We have about the same 21,000 or so genes in our body, so once we were developing over millions of years, once the DNA blocks for different proteins and enzymes were developed, they stayed in place, they were like this works let's keep this, and now let's develop a new species out of this.
So, what the role is for precision medicine in One Health is that really it's all the same thing. It's now applying genetics, and so, that's kind of the newer part and why it's come up again, that let's give it a new name and give it more new enthusiasm, let's call it precision medicine and One Health. And so it's all tied in to the same thing, it's now just really using genetics to address our treatment plans but geneticists have always known to use the information from mice, and from dogs, and from cats, and from humans, so we've always actually really taken a One Health approach."
